Creating a brand

 

Now is time to explain who is this strange guy!
It is the product of the process of creating a brand for a new, hypothetical company.
This was a project for a graphic course: we have to create a new company and its main product, no limit to the imagination, requirement was to be coherent and convincing.
I imagined a start-up that was going to develop an A.I. capable of replacing its owner in all the aspects of the social/web life: gaming, chatting, posting comments and so on.
Obviously the A.I. was configurable and reporting to the owner on a schedule defined by the owner itself.
Starting from this idea there was the task of choosing a proper name, and the right font for it.
The next step was creating a graphic logo for the company.
I ended this phase with the horizontal log:

And also the compact version:

The next phase in the project was creating something special for the company and there, as you already guessed, the compact version of the name became central, with just some simple transformations a small robot character could be created:

So the small robot became the friendly interface of the A.I., especially for humans not much knowing about computers. And it was also a key graphical/emotional element for the possible applications:

It won the benevolence of the course members, and also a 3D render for the final page of the  Brand Development Guide.
As said in a previous post: all the elements of the character have a real meaning! :)

A new little friend

 

A new little guy was added to the number of sketches and creations!
Ok it is just a simple 3d model, and also quite schematic... so what can make it so interesting?
Trust me: there is a reason for each element of this simple model.
More on this in a future post :)

Apatosaurus (low poly)

Here it is another dinosaur, this time an Apatosaurus.
I think I'm going to create a group of them and then set up a scene of some kind (obviously I will not have enough time to do any of that ) ... we will see ;).
And now a bit of movement:

Rat Marauder 3D - next step

The Rat Marauder model has been retouched a bit during the past months.
The result is that has just some basic materials and textures but, ...
I've tried adding some hairs and now there are 5 hair particle systems applied to the model, but I did something more ...
I've experimented a bit with the armor he is wearing and the possibilities of animating it togheter with the body and:

Here it is it: with a bit of effort I managed the linking of the armor to the body (the most useful function available for achieving this result was not functionig in blender, hope they replaced/restored it now), and a constant struggle with the hair system was needed for doing almost everything, but in the end there is a model that can switch from low res to high res with its rig and hairs working because no modifier was applied but the mirror (the above render is a mix: low res hammer and armor high res for the body).

Stegosaurus (low poly)

Some months are passed from the last post. During this period I've made some different things, one of which was modeling a bit, as usual using Blender, and the result was a new dinosaur low poly model.

This time it is a Stegosaurus, with a basic rig to make some simple animation and poses.

Rat Marauder 3D

And now, at the end of the year, back to 3D!
One of the Rat Marauders found the way to the 3D realm and a new model was born :)
As you can see there are more details than in the original sketch: there is an armour and a great war-hammer as weapon.
 

Unity 1 - Black Knight

After having create the main structure of a simple game in Blender Game Engine, I tried some simple experiments in a different 3D engine: Unity.
I think I'm going to try some more ... :) but for now simply the import of an animated model, created in Blender, and the use of scripts for testing the animations.
For the Black Knight you can use the following keys:

- Right Arrow, starts ccw rotation.
- Left Arrow, starts cw rotation.
- W, walk.
- R, run.
- Space Bar, attack.
- I, idle.

The small game project (more details on that in a future post) is waiting for the new Blender release to see if, at the least, the use of a game controller is correctly enabled as in older versions of the software.

Low-poly cartoon Dragon

And now: ... the main character ... the hero ... the small (and a bit fat ;) ) dragon Alex !!
Yes, here is the man who can solve the quest. Not really a man but ... child likes dragons, or so it seems. Obviously there is nothing to say about the name and who chose it (quite easy to guess, no ?)
I liked the idea of modeling a cute low poly dragon and, when it was finished, even Alex liked it and decided its name ad asked me to make it walk ...
From there it was easy thinking of doing even something more, it took a lots of time, but now the main structure of a simple game done in Blender BGE is ready and more ideas are coming! :)

Low-poly cartoon Black Knight

Some times ago I posted a picture of a low res model of a cartoon ghost.
Now is the time of the Black Knight.
They are both elements of a project that is based on Blender and the Blender Game Engine.
My last spare time was dedicated to thar and now, the base structure of the whole project is quite ready, there is still a lot of work to do, and some diasappointing findings are slowing down the progress but it is surely an interesting way of learning new things.
First of all, I found, that the 2.74 release of Blender is not more capable of reading correctly the events generated by an Xbox controller, hopefully this will be restored into the next patch or release.
Second I'm having a lots of trouble in using sounds, at the point that I'm really leaving them out of the project for now.
Third I found a 'bug' involving near sensor and the navigation mesh, I used a Python script to avoid the wrong results of that.
But going back to the small guy of the picture: he is a real bad guy! And he is going to use his sword to hunt down the main character, helped by the ghost, obviously! :)

Music of Nature

After a long time there is the animation related to the Leaf screnshot of a precedent post.
This was an idea born a long time ago and in its first version the storyboard included a tall plant (possibly a tree), a small pond, some vegetation and a sunrise. Then the semplification, and the search for what was my focus of interest in all the visualzation.
Now there is a minimal number of elements and the overall atmosphere is different from the first sketch but, really, is more near to what moved me toward this scene in the first time.
The story is about the discovering of the music hide inside the nature, as the drops falling from a leaf. It can be a difficult process and can run slowly at the start, but when its rules are grasped it runs faster as it becomes easier.
The project is completely done in Blender. The Leaf is a  complex model with a minimal depth and lot of details. The drop moving along the leaf surface is the result of a fluid simulation. Sad to say but there are not much instruments n Blender to work on the geometry resulting from a simulation, so, in the end, this was the best I could achieve in a reasonable time.
There is no sound but, if I will find what is needed and some more spare time, it could be that I can try to match the video with a simple sound project: it will start from the sounds of a quiet field, then giving space to the splash of the first drop, and then to the the sound of a single note released when it collides with the water surface. Easy but I think it cold creat a good oveall effect, just have to find the time to test this idea! ;)

Low-poly cartoon Ghost

This is the ghost character that I've modeled for a new idea I was working on, and as usual Who knows if there will be time enough for making the idea a real thing ... For the moment some 'strange' models are taking shape of low-poly and cartoonish characters and it is quite enjoiable following the toon's style :)
All the elements I'm modeling are designed for a childish graphic effect and for use in real-time ... more to follow in future posts!

Leaf

I'm just working at a new project in Blender the animation is not still finished but I'm using the render of a still frame as background for my new tablet. Rendered using Cycles.

Cloister

An old animation done in Blender. A lots of details (look at the roof tiles, no textures there), procedural texture, particles for the pebbles and the grass, fluid simulations, reflections...the render took an awful amount of time...the fly of a little bird in a cloister. I enjoied very much modelling this scene...and the texturing and lighting  was done in internal render (shadow areas are deliberately a bit overexposed for showing the details). The worst thing was discovering the limit for the details of the fluid in its rendering context.

Triceratops

This year I've had very few spare moments for doing 3D, just a bit of time for doing this other low poly model: a small triceratops. Hopefully I can succeed and spare some more hours next week and try to animate it :).

Animations 2D/3D

A collection of exercises proposed for a basic CG animation course.

Wyvern

After a long time a new post! :)
This is my last experiment with Blender 2.5. Last post was about a dragon wing animation...so the obvious next step was...try to let a dragon fly!
Ok, for those who have an insight of the fantasy creatures universe is clear that we are not looking a dragon but a wyvern (note the long tail with the venomenous sting ;) ) but there is no 'really' great difference for the animation pourposes.
At the end of modelling I was quite pleased with this model, so I tried some animations. First some basic movements and then something more complex using miltiple Actions and the NLA editor.
And there are two quick tips for using NLA editor and the Strips: first of all the strip at the Top of the work area of the editor is the strip currently visible in the 3D view port. Unless you change the blending mode of this strip, his animations are all you can see and render. But this is true even if you select an action in the Action Editor. The Action you select becomes the very first line of the NLA (a red row with the key markers visible) and 'covers' the effects of all the other strips.
Second, you can move the strips but you can't overlap them. So you need always some free space (empty rows) if you want to change a strip location (row or column). If the strip you want move doesn't fit in the available free space of the row above, or behind, you can't move it.
Bye and happy blending!

Dragon wing

My last experiment in animating a dragon wing in Blender 2.59.
Animated using a mix of armature and soft-body system.

Blender 2.59

If you haven't already cheked now it is the time!
The new Blender 2.59 release is out...
go and grab your copy! :)

Werewolf

Another screen capture animation done in Blender 2.5.

Some months ago I've done this short animation, and placed the movie on the web, the past week alchymest found it and in answer to his question...

Inspired by tutorial seen on the web about sculpting and animating a werewolf head, then moving on an intriguing (for me) question: is there a quick way for realizing the transformation as a sequence and using just the shape animation for the model and a single rig?
After some experimentation I realized that something could be done, but in a quite tricky way:

actually the mesh is one with shape animation but there are two rigs on it, one for the man and one for the wolf, so you have to plan mesh and rigs in an appropriate way. And then you HAVE to pass trhough the rest positon of your mesh (for this model a classical T position) during the tranformation.

The eyes are two pairs, one for the man and one for the wolf model.

Hope that gives an idea on how I made it.

First sculpt in Blender 2.57

As announced in the last sculpting post, this new creature is modeled and sculpted in Blender.
On the left you can see a sculpted version of the creature (the original scketch, is in the 2D section of the GraphYka site). Really this is not an high poly version, there are just 250.000 polygons, so nothing really special.
Below yuo can see a low poly version, 1.800 polygons, textured with the normal map baked from the sculpted model.
What I noticed working to this project is, as expected, the really need for a good hardware configuration: Blender computes the actual geometry of your model so a large amount of memory, fast cpu and good graphic card are all required. Otherwise you can be slowed seriously down at few millions of polygons (2 could be enough).

If you have ever used Zbrush, you already know that the polygon count could rise quite a bit even using not expecially powerful pc. But this is due to the peculiar way of this software in managing the models and his highly optimized workflow even with huge amount of data.
But most important I learned something about the modifiers in Blender and the importance of applying them to the model at the right time.
The mirror modifier could be very useful but apply it befor you start sculpting or marking the seams for textures mapping, or you can incur in some troubles, like me.
Infact, I think, that I'll restart from a low poly version of the model and then resculpt for trying the texture  painting both of an high res and of a low res models.